Library of America is a nonprofit organization that champions our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing what is widely recognized as the definitive collection of great American writing. Hosted by LOA president and publisher Max Rudin, LOA LIVE features illuminating and entertaining talks with acclaimed authors, critics, historians, and other special guests. To learn more and browse our catalog, visit loa.org. LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation at loa.org/loalive to support future presentations.
December 2—Groundbreaking critic and revered scholar Helen Vendler could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” wrote Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. For Vendler, who died last year, the language and form of a poem can reveal its writer’s deepest thoughts and feelings—an empathic approach that found full expression in her last essays, collected in the new Library of America special publication Inhabit the Poem (https://www.loa.org/books/inhabit-the-poem-last-essays/).
To celebrate these career-crowning pieces, four acclaimed poets, scholars, and former students of Vendler’s gather to reflect on her remarkable achievement: Harvard professor and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Stephanie Burt, celebrated poet-critic Dan Chiasson, Vendler’s literary executor Christopher Spaide, and essayist Kamran Javadizadeh, Professor of English at Villanova. Join us for a lively evening of personal remembrances and insights into the great critic’s assessments of poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson to Ocean Vuong.
25 Nov 2025
The Radical Imagination of Octavia E. Butler
Monday, November 24—Like a signal from a distant star, Octavia E. Butler’s luminous fiction jumps galactic distances to relay searing, often surprising revelations about the universe we inhabit and the planet we call home. In Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy (https://www.loa.org/books/liliths-brood-the-xenogenesis-trilogy/), just published by Library of America, three classics of Afrofuturist speculative fiction from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winner confront urgent questions about technology, hybridity, and the future of humankind.
To explore these prophetic masterworks and their inimitable creator, LOA LIVE presents two preeminent scholars and writers in conversation: Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and editor of the LOA Xenogenesis edition, and Tananarive Due, World Fantasy Award–winning novelist and a close friend of Butler’s, about whom she once wrote: “Sister, we got cities burning, they were telling her. And how dare she retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around.”
11 Sept 2025
Reading Democracy in America Now
Wednesday, September 10—Two centuries on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America (https://www.loa.org/books/202-democracy-in-america/?no_lightbox=1) remains the most prescient account of the virtues, and potential dangers, of our politics and culture. How do Tocqueville’s insights illuminate current events and political trends, both at home and abroad?
Join four distinguished scholars for a lively debate on the continued resonance of this enduring masterpiece: Yale professor Joanne Freeman (acclaimed author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War), Pulitzer Prize–winning NYU historian Steven Hahn (Illiberal America: A History), Harvard’s James T. Kloppenberg (Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought), and Olivier Zunz, Commonweath Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the definitive LOA edition of Democracy in America (https://www.loa.org/books/202-democracy-in-america/?no_lightbox=1), featuring Arthur Goldhammer’s celebrated translation.
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